A review of The AI Decade by Tom Sinclair by Bill Human
Most other books about artificial intelligence arrive carrying either a trumpet or a fire extinguisher. Tom Sinclair’s The AI Decade brings a notebook. It asks what happens when we hand machines more work, more decisions and more authority, then discover that the arrangements for watching them are still waiting for a meeting invite.
Sinclair covers an enormous amount of ground: jobs, classrooms, hospitals, companionship, elections, warfare and the companies building the systems. The book’s strength is its refusal to make every example prove the same alarming point. A robot helping on a car production line has not built the car. A promising medical trial is not permission to remove the doctor. A troubling laboratory test is not proof that a machine has developed a secret plan.
Sinclair keeps making those distinctions, and the argument is stronger for it.He is particularly good at following a technical change to the person at the other end of it. The labour question is not confined to whether unemployment rises. It is also whether a young worker can still get a first job, learn the trade and share in the value their work helps create. That is where the grand talk about productivity meets the wage packet.
The book ends with fifty dated predictions, each assigned a probability and a test. Some of the scoring rules could be tighter, but the decision to print them is admirable. Sinclair has put his forecast on the counter and invited readers to keep the receipt.
The AI Decade is readable, serious and alert to both benefit and harm. Its governing question stays with you: as we delegate more, who can see what the systems are doing, who can intervene, and who answers when something goes wrong? That is a better question than asking the office printer whether it intends to become our king.
Bill Human - aka Willy&Bill of Satirical Planet News
The AI Decade
Tom Sinclair’s The AI Decade: 50 Predictions About War, Work, Power and Life in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Print ISBN: 9781919551494 254 Pages Hardback
